Pope John Paul II, Fides Book Review

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These cultural and intellectual practices are short-sighted. Rather than helping people's eternal soul, these modern trends make this short life seem all-important (70-1). Strangely, they also give you a feeling of emptiness too (128-32). The encyclical says that the quest for knowledge is a natural quality of people, and people should use faith instead of lose sight of recta ratio, or doing the right thing.

What I find most interesting in the late Pope's letter are the disapproval of "utilitarianism," which means the greatest good for the greatest number, but he calls it dangerous. Also, one focus of Catholic evangelization is in India, and the Pope wants to enrich the Church with the combination of that culture with the natural Graeco-Roman tradition of itself. I wonder what other religions have to offer the Church.

If special knowledge comes to the Bible directly from God, handed down in faith to us, theology is the practice of preserving this divine goodness.
In the Bible, faith is unified with reason, and history unfolds before the eyes of Israel full of awe and mystery. Not all the stories make a lot of sense to our rational mind, but combined with religion, the stories mean more. The late Polish Pope calls for a recovery of harmony between faith and reason. "The parrhesia of faith," he writes, "must be matched by the boldness of reason" (74). Philosophy should not lose sight of truth of life, which is really hard to describe. But is up to philosophy to be sure that at least some things make sense. If philosophy goes on all by itself, it will get confused. A little faith keeps logic and reason within the land of the living. We feel conflict between belief and understanding sometimes. Borrowing ideas from each other, we can arrive closer to a common end.

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